A plate of thousands of islands between two American mainlands
The Caribbean is a region of thousands of islands, islets, reefs and cays wrapped around the Caribbean Sea, sitting mostly on the Caribbean tectonic plate between North and South America. It takes its name from the Caribs, an Amerindian people of the Lesser Antilles, and today counts 33 political entities, 13 of them sovereign states.
Island arcs frame the sea: the Greater Antilles to the north and the Lesser Antilles, including the Leeward and Windward Islands, to the east and south. The Bahamas, the Turks and Caicos and Barbados count as Caribbean even though they do not touch the sea, and so, for cultural and political reasons, do Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana. Mainland coasts from the Yucatán to Cartagena and Maracaibo are also included, and the UN geoscheme treats the region as distinct.
The oldest human traces lie at Banwari Trace in southern Trinidad, about 7,000 years old. Pottery-making farmers of the Saladoid culture reached Trinidad from South America between 400 and 200 BC and spread quickly up the island chain, and DNA studies show these Ceramic Age canoe voyagers displaced earlier foragers. By the time Europeans arrived, the Taíno held the Greater Antilles and Bahamas, Island Caribs the Windward Islands, and the Ciboney western Cuba.
Columbus landed on Hispaniola in 1492, and Spain's encomienda system of forced labour devastated native populations; enslaved Africans were imported from 1503. Around 5 million Africans were eventually shipped to the Caribbean, about half of them to British islands, and slavery lasted in Cuba until 1886. Pirates, the buccaneers, flourished especially from 1640 to 1680, and European rivalries turned the islands into a battleground for centuries.
A slave uprising in French Saint-Domingue that began in 1791 produced Haiti in 1804, the region's first republic. Cuba won independence in 1898 after American intervention, while Puerto Rico, Spain's last American colony, became a US territory. Later experiments included the British West Indies Federation of ten territories, which lasted from 1958 to 1962, and the Netherlands Antilles, dissolved in 2010. Colonisation, slavery, indenture from Asia and modern migration have made it among the most ethnically mixed regions on Earth.
Source: Caribbean
